I'm actually of two (maybe three) minds about it. On the one hand, I blithely tell people I've forgotten more about cars than they'll ever know, which stops the conversation quickly and appropriately. If they press, they learn that it's true. And I can say with fairly frank honesty that there's no object in my life that I don't understand at a basic level… and my life is full of fairly complex gadgets. Could I build the Engine Control Module for my fuel injection on my motorcycle? Not without a lot of time and a lot of trial and error… but I know what it's supposed to do, I know how it does it, I know what components it uses to do it and I have a rudimentary understanding of the way it all goes together. And I honestly don't see how people go through life not understanding how their engine works as clearly as they understand how their heart pumps. Anything else is to live in fear. On the other hand, because I have that level of understanding of how things work, I know that one thing the past 100 years have built up is efficiency and that when one component goes, the rest of the components aren't very far behind. It's like that coffee grinder - yeah, dude, if the shaft is fried, chuck the fucker. The bushings on the motor aren't far behind. Many times the parts you need simply aren't available. I had a rogue Roland JV-1000 for a while because not only did someone spill beer on it, but because the repair shop correctly deduced that the problem was with the I/O board but incorrectly blamed one little chip (the keyscan IC) on said board. So they pulled the chip. Never mind the fact that SMT rework is a stone cold bitch; Roland has their own chip factory where they roll their own ASICs and if you needed a keyscan IC, you were buying the board. Or, because it's Roland, another JV-1000. Which they didn't make any more. So just because you can fix it doesn't mean you should fix it. Because: On yet another hand, what's discussed here: Is called the Ikea Effect. In other words, just because you stuck a screwdriver to it does not mean it's worth more. It means it's worth more to you because you have sunk costs. And oh god. I've got sunk cost fallacies. There's probably six years of my life on that one pathetic page. You should have seen the patchbays. Sweet holy fuck. Just because you can take it all apart and put it all back together again doesn't mean you should.
“This is the highlight of my day,” Vegdahl said as he waited for the chrome Sunbeam, probably a 1950s model, to cool off so he could take it home. “I’m a software person; I don’t have a lot of mechanical aptitude. I’m not good at taking things apart.”